May 2009 Archives

After the crash I had to download bunches of software, among them #VMWare#. I love their software. I use it often for development -- it's a nice thing to keep a project in a virtual machine and know that I can mess the environment as much as I need without fearing the disruption of my daily PC use.
Except downloading it is a pain. The package now weights 500MB (ouch?) and you need to login to download. No wget for you. Why that? You still need a key, so why block direct downloads? So unpractical.

A couple days ago my computer was suddenly very slow. There were no apparent errors I thought that Eclipse was hogging the PC again. I shut it down, still slow. Fine, just reboot.
Tons of errors on my primary HD. It still could be accessed, but barely.
Ever since my first disk crash (caused, too many years ago, by doublespace; if you know what doublespace is, you've been using computers for too long), I started to backup more or less regularly. So I lost almost nothing important, have everything I've made up to a few weeks back and thanks to the cloud not even one email (except for a couple accounts which I don't keep emails on the server). SVN is also very helpful in these events. All LikeOrHate code anda data is completely fine -- even the bleeding edge development stuff.
It was less traumatic than expected, though I still am reinstalling everything. It killed my linux partition, which was the same (moved through many HDs) since 1996. Perhaps it was time to clean it up. Unfortunately, some stuff I didn't backup (media files) may be gone for ever. I could take the disk to have the data back, but it's not worth the price they charge. Perhaps the Gods Of Computers will let me get some of those gigabytes back before I convert the old HD into #frisbee#s.
And perhaps that mirrored RAID that I used to consider only for servers is not an overkill for my desktop either.